CI/CD Fundamentals: Pipelines, Testing and Deployment

Learn CI/CD concepts and GitHub Actions: pipelines, automated testing, environments, deployment strategies and secrets. For developers and DevOps beginners.

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What you'll learn

  • Explain CI, continuous delivery and continuous deployment.
  • Design a pipeline with build, test and deploy stages as code.
  • Write GitHub Actions workflows with jobs, steps, caching and matrices.
  • Choose blue-green, canary or rolling deployments and manage environments and secrets.
  • Monitor releases, roll back safely and measure delivery with DORA metrics.

Syllabus

Module 1: Getting Started

  1. The Problem CI/CD Solves
  2. Continuous Integration
  3. Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment

Module 2: Pipelines

  1. What is a Pipeline?
  2. Typical Pipeline Stages
  3. Pipeline as Code

Module 3: GitHub Actions

  1. A Minimal Workflow
  2. Jobs & Steps
  3. Marketplace Actions
  4. Caching & Matrix Builds

Module 4: Automated Testing in CI

  1. Why Tests Must Run Automatically
  2. Unit vs Integration Tests in a Pipeline
  3. Failing Fast

Module 5: Environments

  1. Dev / Staging / Production
  2. Environment Config & Secrets

Module 6: Deployment Strategies

  1. Blue-Green Deployment
  2. Canary Releases
  3. Rolling Deployments

Module 7: Secrets & Security

  1. Managing Secrets in CI
  2. Security Scanning in a Pipeline

Module 8: Artifacts

  1. Build Artifacts & Registries

Module 9: Observability

  1. Monitoring & Rollback
  2. Measuring Delivery: DORA Metrics